With the Reapers defeated, humanity looks to the future, even as it learns of the machinations of the Reapers in Earth’s history… nearly four thousand years ago.

Before humanity took to the stars, the mad Pharaoh Akhenaten chased his dreams of the heavens and nearly destroyed his kingdom. The strength of Egypt was crucial to human development, but it almost fell prey to dark guidance.

Finally, a forbidden chapter of history sees the light of day. Once erased from the annals of time, the story of Egypt’s hidden crisis can be told. The story of one known only as The Shepherd.

.

Brass Effect Cover Art

…OK, this was mostly an excuse to put a story to that scarab–khopeshMass Relay variant that I wound up doodling as I perused the Mass Effect wiki. Here’s the closeup simplified version.

Brass Relay

I still haven’t played the games, and likely never will, but there’s something compelling about the concepts and the art. I picked up this The Art of Mass Effect book a while back when a local game shop went out of business, and it’s been percolating in my mind since. (…and holy schamoley, it’s selling for how much? Man, I got a deal on it.) It’s a solid book, though I’ll admit that I want the Art of Guild Wars a wee bit more. Still, fan of Star Trek and Star Wars as I am, the Mass Effect universe and its pseudomagic technobabble are interesting, so it’s fun to at least peruse the wiki a bit.

OK, OK, I’m also driven to learn more about the lore because of the whole “Mass Effect 3’s ending is so stoooopid” kerfluffle going around. I fancy myself a writer and game designer, and I figure it behooves me to understand what’s going on when there’s a storm in the gaming world like that.

Anyway, I admit I’m walking a fine line between spoof and serious here. I do think there’s potential to do some “backstory” prequels to the main Mass Effect trilogy. Akhenaten is a curious historical figure, and Egypt was at one point the foremost society on Earth, with a strong interest in astronomy. OK, “Shepherd” is obvious, but hey, it fits. Also, the idea of taking the shepherd’s crook and the khopesh and giving them some more meaning (they are key to some Egyptian imagery of the Pharaohs) appeals to the art history geek in me. There’s also the potential to do a little Stargate riff with some high tech Egyptian craziness. Maybe even include something like the Antikythera mechanism, conveniently all about astronomical positions.

And then there are the story twists that I like… spoilers down yonder if you want them. Maybe I’m just a sci-fi fiction fanboy, and maybe I’m too close to my own idea here, but this sort of sounds… good.

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

OK, spoilers.

…

…

…

…

There’s a lot of story potential here, I think. Secret Egyptian stuff has long been interesting to a lot of people, and Akhenaten was King Tut’s father, but a bit of an oddball with plenty of grey space to explore. Specifically, I’m imagining that fancy scarab to be partially brass, an heirloom of the Pharaohs. Naturally, it’s also something more, in this case, a bit of Reaper tech with that nasty tricksy Indoctrination ability. It’s been feeding the Egyptian kings ideas to mold the future of humanity. That’s twist one, though it’s a mild one that really just sets the scene and gives us a reason to care about ancient Egypt in the Mass Effect universe.

Twist two, Akhenaten has a congenital brain defect that means the Indoctrination tech works differently on him. Specifically, he sees more than the tech wants him to see, and he doesn’t fall prey to the Reaper will. He actually understands the impulses as dangerous, and tries to use that knowledge and steer Egypt and humanity away from the Reaper influence. He’s seen as mad… but only because he’s the only sane one in the room who sees the bigger picture, and he’s woefully underequipped to express some of the alien concepts, even if anyone would believe him in the first place.

Twist three, The Shepherd also has a Reaper artifact, though it’s a nondescript heirloom in his/her family line of shepherds. They are no heroes, but they have a knack at being in the right place at the right time, albeit usually in small ways unremarkable to the historians. This is why the story is largely ignored; it wasn’t recorded by humans, but the Reapers were very aware of it, and it’s only now, picking through the aftermath of their defeat, that humans finally get the story. The Shepherd is also Indoctrinated, but this one sticks. The player is sold on the idea of stopping the Mad King Akhenaten to Save the World, but stopping him just puts humanity through a course correction, so it’s back on the path to the events in the original Mass Effect trilogy. Those Reapers play a long game with plenty of contingencies and gears within gears.

Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in the DLC and reframe you as the real hero in a triple cross, where you actually wind up fusing The Shepherd’s consciousness into a small probe that gets sent to the Citadel to merge with the resident AI. Or something.

Appropriately after my last post, I just finished up the Uldum questlines (dungeons aside) in World of Warcraft and then hit level 85 in a random Looking For Dungeon run in the air palace above the south shoreline of Uldum, perhaps appropriately in Cat form, surrounded by the carcasses of bird things.

So I went to Thunder Bluff, perched on the highest point I could find in Swift Flight Form and logged off.

All done

(This shot in Orgrimmar looks better, but Thunder Bluff is still my favorite WoW capitol city, and it just makes sense for a Tauren.)

Almost done

I won the game, right? Tishtoshtesh is on par with some old worldraidbosses (OK, the weakest ones, but still…). The Uldum story is done. Time for a well-earned rest.

Time to go do some spoof game artwork (hint: ME4) and finish up Zomblobs!

(Yes, I’ve been slacking on Zomblobs! a bit. I ran into a mental roadblock, and sometimes the best thing to do is step away for a little bit. I think ultimately I’m just going to run with what I have in mind for the game and if playtesting shows it’s stupid, it gets changed. That’s what betas are for, after all.)

My tale has come to an end, my story has been committed to some sort of record. I lived, I existed, I fought the good fight, I made a mark on the fabric of the universe, if ever so small. It is finished, the end, game over.

And it is good.

…

…

…

…no, I’m not quitting the blog (though I’ve certainly been too busy to write my usual walls of text), I’m just musing. I’m in that sort of mood again, where I contemplate narrative, endings, entropy and death. Not because I’m depressed, no, but because I think endings are important to life, and crucial for stories that make life interesting.

It seems to me that there are two major schools of thought regarding story endings… for lack of a professional taxonomy, I’ll call them the Concretists and the Abstractists. They seem to roughly track with “Western vs. Eastern” or “Blue Collar vs. White Collar” or even “Nerdy vs. Artsy Fartsy”. All highly technical terms, by the way. There’s even a little of the Myers-Briggs flavor to some of the debate, along the Thinking-Feeling axis. (This overlaps a little with the Introvert/Extrovert axis, but it’s more about thought process, not social function.)

Concretists want the story to make sense and come to a logical conclusion. Even if the logic is strained, if it’s consistent with the world as presented, the whole experience is enhanced. This is perhaps embodied best in the morality tale mentality that runs deep in classical European fairy tales, or even Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” monomyth theory that underlies so many fictional yarns.

Abstractists are more interested in the emotional investment and the potential to interpret a fuzzy ending. Craving involvement with the story, an Abstractist loves a “neverending story” because it can fulfill that desire to indulge in immersion and endlessly ponder the deeper meanings of a fantasy life. Interpretation and pontification are almost more important than the original story.

I’m pretty sure that these are not fully isolated mindsets in general, but when it comes to ending a story, they run in clear contrast to each other. I find myself strongly in the Concretist camp, though as an author and artist, I certainly see the appeal of Abstractist thought. To my mind, endings are important because we can then move on. We can take what we learned and apply it in new ways out here in the Real World “monkeyspace” instead of dumping our hopes and ambitions into fruitless, unresolvable fiction. Abstract endings don’t end so much as just… stop. There’s a difference.

This isn’t to say that I always need or want happy endings. This is not a dream for rainbows and unicorn droppings in every facet of life. We do learn to understand life better when we experience the bitter and the sweet. Discerning between the two is an important psychological building block, and a crucial part of learning good judgment is learning how to anticipate the two and make choices to mold the future.

I’m simply noting that resolution is an important part of education. Understanding the process in something like Investigations Math or the “New Math” of decades back can be valuable, but without a destination in mind, complete with clear goals and consequences, we’re really not going to make much cognitive progress. We’ll just be feeling our way through unstable fields, building a cocoon of contentment with our own perception rather than building comprehension of the truths of the world around us. (To be sure, there’s a tangent to run about anthropic principles, quantum questions, religion and science, but I’ll just note that I believe that actual absolute truths exist, whether or not we understand them… and that the best of science and faith are interested in understanding those truths.)

When it comes to storytelling, if we are ever searching for resolution, but always held from it by teasing muses, sure, we might maintain interest for a bit longer than we would with a real ending, but we’ll wind up lacking perspective as the shifting story blows us about with every wind of authorial whimsy. Authors can get lost and wind up in a terrible cycle of retcons or rewrites, changing characters or events willy nilly or even on the fly. (There’s probably room in there to complain about scorched earth storytelling and Serenity, but I’m still too annoyed about that movie to put together anything cohesive, and well, it really was a resolution, just one I didn’t like. Stupid Whedon.)

So yes, as good as Inception was, the ending seemed like a bit of a copout to me. Leaving Dom’s fate to the viewer is perhaps a sly allusion to the themes of the movie, so it’s a successful gambit that works for the story being told, but the nonresolution seems a bit too, well, abstract to me. That said, it could also work to illustrate my point if we take Dom’s view. One of the theories about the show suggests that Dom makes a choice at the end to simply accept whatever “ending” he presently found himself in when he had his children back. He ended his own quest, and whether or not it was “real” doesn’t matter. He stopped looking, he chose an ending and moved on.

Chuck had a similar sort of “it’s up to the viewer” ending, though it was less about the nature of reality and more about the key relationship that drove the angst and triumph in the show’s narrative arcs. This seems to me to be an even bigger copout than the Inception ending, but it has certainly driven interest in the show past its finale, with talk of a comic or movie to continue the adventure. At the same time, it also bears resemblance to the silly “will they or won’t they” romantic tension between Chuck and Sarah that wound up being overplayed in early seasons. Stringing along viewers only plays well for a little while, then it just gets old as the authors find ever-more-implausible reasons to keep the characters spinning their wheels in emotional ruts.

I suspect the metagame concerns about how game design is supposed to function and how the game market works is far more important than the actual Mass Effect story itself. It’s nice to see the nature of narrative bandied about; I think it’s important to designers to understand how narrative works and its interaction with… interactivity, and how those facets affect their game design. Storytelling is still important, even though we have a slightly different medium in games.

In the end, I think we’ll never really be able to make the Concretists and the Abstractists agree. That’s OK, though, since we do tend to need a bit of both (abstract thought tends to be the spark that fuels a lot of “what if” experimentation, which can be just as crucial as observation when it comes to learning about the world around us). Still, I think that real endings with resolution are the lion’s share of a healthy fiction diet, if for no other reason than they allow us to move on to the next story rather than be emotionally stuck in a mire of questions. Keep moving forward, keep learning. Experiment and ask those important “what if” questions, but realize that they have answers, and it’s important to move on to the next questions, building on what is known to reach into the unknown.

The end of one story often leads to the beginning of a new one, with a wiser audience in tow. That, to me, is a big part of why I think stories are important. They can teach us in ways that nonfiction cannot, including giving us tools to move on and make our real lives better in ways that we might not have otherwise imagined or experienced. That’s one of the strengths of the written word in the first place; to learn from others what we may never have the chance to learn on our own.

I have nowhere near the pull or presence to make this sort of thing happen, I just wanted to mention it because, well… I thought it could be funny and/or fodder for blog posts, and maybe someone can take the idea and run with it.

Big Bear Butt has recently done some PvP, and one of the things he mentioned was setting up a cross-realm battle comprised of teams of bloggers. That’s a fun idea, and could spur some interesting posts. Putting a pseudo-face to a name in-game has a way of changing things, ever so subtly.

I can’t help but think that a similar session of PvP comprised wholly of baby Death Knights might be worth attempting. Let’s call it, A Dead Man’s Party.